Ashley West was born in 1953 in Kettering, Northamptonshire and graduated in Fine Art at Leicester Polytechnic in 1978. He lives and has a studio in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. Early work was influenced by the automatism and lyricism of painters such as Alan Davie, Graham Sutherland and Peter Lanyon, while at Leicester he became interested in the colour fields and grids employed in the minimalist work of Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin. His work explores the relationship between these two processes - the automatic, and the measured. He acknowledges Richard Diebenkorn as the most profound influence on his work of the last ten years. Present work reflects an increasing interest in the horizontal layering of Moroccan rugs, the shifting motifs of Shoowa designs and the structure of Persian miniatures.